On line shopping is now commonplace and increasingly users shop using their mobile devices. A variety of online shopping services are available and more are being proposed. One approach to on-line shopping presents the customer with a group of linked web pages about products or services of one or more sellers. These pages may also offer one or more search options to help the user navigate through the various pages to the page about the item of current interest to the particular shopper. A shopper may select an item for purchase and pay for it by sending credit card information using a secure web page.
The shopping experience at conventional brick-and-mortar stores, however, is largely unchanged. Customers enter the store and need to search the store for a particular product. If customers need assistance, they must find a salesperson or customer service representative and often wait for them to finish serving another customer. This is the case even if the customer has a quick question that the representative could answer while continuing to serve the other customer. Furthermore, to purchase a product, the customer must find the product in the store, take it to a sales person, wait while the salesperson enters the information into a point-of-sale terminal, present payment and wait for the payment to be processed.
With increasing automation and decreasing profit margins, it is common for retail stores to reduce the number of salespersons and customer service representatives on duty at any given time. This makes it more difficult for customers to shop, increasing their frustration levels.
Mobile devices may be used to enhance the shoppers experience in a conventional retail store. For example, they may be used, for example, to obtain coupons or to obtain and compare prices of products by scanning their universal product code (UPC) barcodes. These uses, however, do not address the problems outlined above.